The past few days I've been reading a lot about the psychology of "packrat-itis" (apparently that's a word?) and hoarding. I've never actually watched the tv show "Hoarders" because I don't really watch much tv, but I think most people have heard of it. Hoarding is actually a clinical disorder where a person has trouble deciding what to keep or throw away and defaults to keeping things. Hoarding is packrat-itis to the extreme - things piled to the ceiling, to the point of where it is a danger to the person. The scary thing is that at the root, I have that same problem, just within a normal range. When I can't decide whether or not to keep something, I default to keeping it almost every time. It's not always obvious, because I'm extremely organized, so I can keep a lot of things without it being noticeable.
Growing up, my room was always super messy, with piles of stuff everywhere. I remember that when I was in 4th grade, I bought a hamster cage with my own money, and my mom told me that I could buy a hamster when I cleaned my room. In high school, I finally sold that hamster cage to a neighbor. The thing is though that my room wasn't necessarily a typical messy room. I never had dirty clothes or any trash laying around. What I had was a lot of papers mostly, a few half-finished projects - the problem was that I had too many. When I went away to college, I was surprisingly neat and tidy in my dorm room. Everything was always put away in its place. I can't remember exactly when it was, maybe the summer after my first year of college, I came home and cleaned my entire room. It took a long time. I threw a lot away, but unfortunately I also put a lot in boxes to put in the attic. I still wanted to keep it all, just in a more organized, put-away, fashion.
I think maybe part of the reason I'm so organized is because I've always had so much stuff. It takes a lot of work and effort to organize it all, but I do it. I remember when I was teaching and I went from two subjects to three. I upped my organization to color coding. I had a shelf for each subject, my plans were each in their own notebook on the right side of the shelf, papers to pass out on the left, papers to grade and return in a stackable tray on my desk. I'm very good a managing a ton of stuff. Even though I had a ton of clothes, they were always organized by type and usually within each type I put the last thing I wore on the right so I wouldn't repeat too often.
However, a few days ago when I was going through the Cladwell capsule wardrobe course, something struck me. In the last video they said, "What would happen if you were to apply these principles of intentionality and purpose to all the areas of your life? Imagine the freedom and peace of mind." Honestly, I found that thought at the same time liberating and terrifying. I spend so much time and mental energy organizing thing. What if I had less things? What would I do with my time? I think the perfectionist part of me wants to keep working on my winter capsule continuously, but the whole point of doing a capsule is to stop doing that. It's really hard for me to stop, to say that something is "good enough." But I'm going to try. In Kondo's book, she recommends tackling decluttering by type, with clothing being first, so I think I'm going to stop on clothing until next season and maybe start on something else!
Question: Do you want to see how I'm using my winter capsule to create outfits? Let me know if you're interested!
If you want more info on the psychology of packrat-itis, here are a few links I bookmarked:
http://www.wisebread.com/help-from-a-former-pack-rat-getting-rid-of-stuff
http://peopleialmostknow.com/kim-cox-the-psychology-of-clutter-and-packrat-solutions/ (this is actually an audio recording, but it is really great)
http://minimalistpackrat.com/2010/10/28/psychology-of-clutter/
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